


Softly Now, We Sink

by goldenslumber



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Ending, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-18 23:04:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15496743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenslumber/pseuds/goldenslumber
Summary: This entire event is a jape, she knows. When she smiles, white teeth sharp against the edges of her scarlet lips, it is a challenge to the entire room. A threat in only the timid, subtle way she manages one, to the man before her, who blazes bright as a dragon fire, and to the entirely of the Southern Kingdom.





	Softly Now, We Sink

“Marry me,” he says, “and we shall have, and rule, all of Westeros.”

Aegon Targaryen is young and much more than the princes in the songs that Sansa had once so loved. 

He was a sailor and soldier before the Great Sept's steps ran red with the blood of his enemies and raised him to the throne. He holds himself ramrod-stiff even now, in the comfort of his very own Red Keep. Yet, proudly, as if he'd always ruled here. The clothes of a king are stiff upon him, though. Silks are severe against his form. The jeweled rings on his fingers are paler than his violet eyes and somehow  _ constricting _ . The fringe on his black and red cloak glitter gold, like his hair, a shining flaxen blonde, crushed beneath the weight of a golden crown. He is the rising sun in the middle of the room, a glorious new reign, the Targaryen returned to overthrow all Usurpers, and every eye is upon him.

Which means that every eye is upon Sansa as well. The Queen of the North, supported by her half-brother, Jon Snow, who supplies her an army of a not-so-neutral variety, has a ferocious reputation. Not, strictly speaking, because of her choices, but from those who have always slipped around her and used her as their piece in this game of thrones. She thrives off this. She smiles, tilts her head, and fusses with the velvet drape of her dress so that it falls just  _ right _ against the line of her collarbone. 

“Which part will be mine, exactly?” she asks. Petyr's cunning once fooled her, and she sees nothing of Petyr in this dragon king, but she can never trust... anything. She knows what marriages and 'great loves' mean for women now. “The narrow slice that I can see from your bedroom window? Is that all?”

Aegon's smile falters. Sansa wonders about the stories she's heard; of his beautiful aunt, the silver queen, who he'd reportedly hung from the bell tower of the Great Sept from a rope made from the entrails of her own dragons (her  _ children _ ). In Sansa's council they whisper behind hands the possibility of his  _ madness _ . They urged her to stay in Winterfell. Arya reminded her that once Starks go south at the invitation of the Iron Throne, so few do they make the journey back. Sandor had begged her to stay.

But it would have been discourteous to refuse the cordial invitation Aegon had sent for her, and Sansa waved away the overcautious, opting to trust in what she knew she could: herself. So.. here she was.

They dance. It is a jape. She can hear the lords and ladies murmuring disapproval from the sidelines. Their young king likes the disapproval, grows brighter because of it, feeds upon it as Daenerys dragons once feasted upon Others. Sansa circles around him, one pale hand caught in his, and he spins her forward and back like a child's kite upon a string. The music is lovely, the climate warm and savory, morsels of the most delectable variety fill the room with the scents of lavender, cloves, cinnamon, spices she cannot name, and, most importantly, lemon cakes. The place is, after all, in celebration.

Out the corners of her eyes she can see the others, watching; highborn ladies with murder written in their faces; sniveling lordly men who will fawn and hang upon Aegon's every move (those who threw their lot with Aegon at the sake of all other kings, or those who had not and still fear his resentment even after their pardons); a knight of the Kingsguard, a shadow, never quite in the center of her vision, flitting around the edges of the crowd with sword in hand and watching, judging,  _ always watching _ .

This entire event is a jape, she knows. When she smiles, white teeth sharp against the edges of her scarlet lips, it is a challenge to the entire room. A threat in only the timid, subtle way she manages one, to the man before her, who blazes bright as a dragon fire, and to the entirely of the Southern Kingdom.

He offers her the best of wines from his very own cup. When he notices her liking of lemon cakes, he makes sure they are constantly in her reach. From his hand he feeds her a fig that doesn't grow in the North – he makes sure she's aware of it... all that the South has that she does not. His own subtly veiled threat. He compliments her on the auburn of her hair and tells her that she reminds him of the sunset. 

Sansa laughs. “It is only ironic,” she tells him when he must know why. “You remind me of the sun.”

“Marry me,” he asks her, again, before the night is out. It will not be the last time. “And you’ll be queen at my side. Westeros is not six kingdoms under the rule of the Iron Throne and has never been meant for that. We need the north, and I cannot forsake you. No one wants more war. I’ll give you–”

“Heirs,” she says, looking to the hands folded demurely in her lap. “Fine food. Exotic wines. Affection. Assassination attempts. Constant scrutiny. My own chamber somewhere here, in the Red Keep, that over time, you'll cease to visit..” When she looks up Aegon's smiling, sunny face is serious, is as severe and stiff as the rest of him, and she knows this is the man beneath the surface. She is relieved to be facing a dragon without the ruse of it being declawed and broken. “Am I missing anything?”

“Only that, if I must, war can–”

“You will not fight,” Sansa says with all the confidence in the world. Her advisers' words ring in her head and escape her month: “You don't have the men. Everyone is planting food to make up for the lack of it in the past winter. Spring is come and what waters the soil is the blood from this past war, and no one wants more fighting. You raise a call and who will come? None, or not enough to punish those who do not. Stannis may have sought to rule the north for some time, same as the kraken, but I've never heard of a dragon warm-blooded enough to stay there long enough to conquer. Daenerys couldn't.”

Aegon stares at her, long and hard. A flush rises in her shoulders and the back of her neck, and she fights to keep it from her face, but fails. She doesn't know if she's right, but thinks so. Maybe he still has the loyalty of his mercenaries from over the seas. Perhaps they were sailing north as she road south and are anchoring in White Harbor that very instant while she sits lavishing in King's Landing.

The fright of that grips her stomach in a fist of thorns. She is nauseous at the thought of losing the north, her kingdom, and can't bear to know she might be tricked –  _ again _ . “It is late,” she says, turning to regard the rest of the party. Most are too drunk to care, too tired to watch the political theatrics in play, or are in the whites of the Kingsguard, watching her and Aegon, in an unnerving way.

“One more thing,” Aegon says and stands, offering an aloof hand. “I have one more thing to offer.”

“Nothing will be enough,” she tells him. “The north belongs to the Starks.”

“Even your father bowed once. The grave Ned Stark – a friend to his king, Robert. If not marry me, befriend me. The realm has bled too much for too long. Won't you put back the last missing piece?”

_ Does he mean that? Is that genuine intent in his eyes? _ Sansa can't tell.

He walks her out onto a balcony on the far side of the Red Keep, overlooking the Blackwater Bay, and slides his hands about her waist as they stand before the view of the sea, tendrils of pink, orange, and yellow light slithering across the wavering surface. “There,” Aegon whispers against her neck, and he nods to the dozens and dozens of ships that are waiting there; their banners flying high, black with a splatter of red thrown across it in the shape of a three-headed dragon. It is an army of them. They are glorious. They will, and have, conquered at his command. The fear slips away from her: there is no fleet heading north. It is here. Aegon isn't the lying, cheating traitors that the Lannisters once were.

And for one fleeting moment, Sansa allows herself to remember the songs of her girlhood. Aegon could be a wondrous prince to sweep her off her feet, to beg her for her hand, to place a crown on her head that no man will come by to snatch. They could have a love people sing songs about. They could be the man and woman who pieced Westeros together after the Long Night. Fire and ice in perfect union.

Then the moment passes. She remembers Joffrey. She looks back into her past and sees the beautiful, dignified woman Cersei Lannister once was, struck by the drunken fool that was Robert Baratheon. “This is a harbor,” Sansa says, softly. “It is safe. These ships are anchored. What makes you think I would want this? Winterfell lies hundreds of leagues from the sea. I have no use for ships.”

She leaves him standing there on that balcony and departs for Winterfell the very next morning. No one stops her. Aegon does not bid her any formal and proper farewell, nor an improper one. She doesn't linger in the south, her sister's word fresh in mind, and makes a point of never returning.

Yet, not a year later, she meets the dragon king again.

* * *

The message that the King of the South is traveling to visit the Queen of the North reaches Winterfell a week before the Targaryen's arrival. The council is a flock of birds flushed out of their nests, too startled to feel anything but fear. Constantly, caw, caw,  _ cawing  _ at Sansa over and over again: “Send him home,” they urge. “Don't let him linger. Don't marry him. Don't listen to a word he speaks.”

They speak, and she listens, looking pretty in her delicate blue silks. They like it when she looks pretty, she knows, and she twists a stray russet strand of hair around a finger while sitting on her throne, thinking of how blue the sky is outside that day. She knew a knight, once, with sapphire eyes so blue that the sky must have spent its days in envy of her. At the reminder of Brienne, Sansa steels herself, pulls herself out of a slouch she was never in, and calls for a horse. She goes riding to clear her head. 

The men of her Queensguard hover close. Most of them disapprove of this waste of time, and Sansa would once have agreed with them. She hated riding where Arya loved it, when they were girls. Riding was dust, sweaty work, and the horses usually smelled no better than the stables. But being a queen meant spending too much time standing still or sitting stiff on a seat of such hard and cold iron she grew weary of the utter, maddening  _ stagnant _ of her life. There was no movement like horse riding. 

By the end of the ride, she tells her advisers she will allow the dragon king to stay for three days.

* * *

When Aegon arrives she sees his face is as sunny and smiling as she remembers. There are the formal introductions, the press of his lips on her hand, warm where the breeze is crisp around them, whirling the hair that fits tight under their crowns. But afterward, when he is in her hall, she sets aside the wine, leans forward, narrows her eyes, and asks, “Have you come to ask for marriage? Or friendship?”

“You wound me. I thought we already were friends, Sansa.”

“Politically,” she dismisses. “A union, for me to bend my knee? It won't happen. Why do you persist?”

“Is it so hard to believe that I find you a beautiful woman in which I want to marry? No other reasons behind it?” he asks, charming smile in place, violet eyes glowing. “You practically dared me to visit you, you know. Challenging me and telling me there was no Targaryen bold enough to stay up here.”

She knows that. A small, fluttering smile touches her lips before she suppresses it. “You'll freeze.”

“Not if you're here to warm me.”

* * *

The very next day she invites him out for a ride. Aegon's Kingsguard gets in the way of her Queensguard and after a mile into the Wolfswood, Sansa kicks her horse into a gallop and isn't surprised at how quickly Aegon follows suit. She knows the woods, he does not, but somehow he can throw himself after her without worrying. There were too many eyes back in the Winterfell castle.

A stream, two small meadows, one shady wall of bracken later, they rein up and meet laughing eye for eye, panting to catch their breath.

“You lost your crown on a branch back there,” Aegon tells her, hooking a thumb over his shoulder.

She should be appalled; her hair is in upheaval, the sleeve of her riding dress slipping down a shoulder, revealing freckles no man should see, her heart is pounding fast,  _ fast _ , because Sandor is no doubt furious and just  _ scarcely _ restraining himself from thrusting a sword through one of Aegon's knights. 

Aegon is in a equal state, though the crown tangled in his hair remains on his head, crooked to a temple, a sharp rise of pink in his cheeks.

Sansa can't  _ help _ leaning gracelessly over in her saddle, reaching for the circlet of gold. She resettles it around the ears of her gelding. “Now you've lost yours, too,” she says.

He laughs, and there is a curl of her lips, that is sweet, secret, and so entirely forbidden.

“Come on,” Sansa says, once they catch their breath. She steers her horse around, still crowned. “We have to go back.”

“As my lady commands.”

* * *

In the next week to come, after Sandor tattled about her little Wolfswood game she played, the council fills Sansa's days with duty. She has no time to talk, nor see her guest, let alone much of anyone. Arya promises to take him to the yard and entertain him the first day, but afterward, Sansa is fearful what Aegon is up to in Winterfell. The three days she allowed him pass and he is still there. He has been told to leave, though he shows no sign of listening to their request. The guard she keeps is doubled, though he had brought little company with him and none are armed enough to endanger her or her people.

A short, guttering snowfall occurs the tenth day. She makes a point of escaping her queen's work for just one moment to at least enjoy the thing the South gives her far better than  _ figs _ . Just one merciful moment wherein she can enjoy the heat of the sun, while also brushing her fingers through the thin, powdery layer of white before it melts. It's only by chance that she is leaning into the wall beside the kitchens that she spots Aegon stuttering through the butcher's yard, around the back of the castle. 

The first snowball takes him in the back of the head.

Aegon whips around, because being  _ hit by an incoming projectile  _ is usually a sign of troubling things. Sansa ducks behind a barrel, staining her dress in the muddy slush there. She doesn't care. It takes him a split second to determine what is going on, whether she’s merely getting out of range from whoever might have hit him or if she is, in fact, getting out of range of a retaliatory strike..

Her second snowball goes wide and lands to his right against the wet stones with a soft sound.

Definitely a retaliatory strike, then. Aegon grins.

“This can't be fair,” he says. “You can’t aim to save your life.”

“Don’t need to if you’re standing still,” she say. She peeks up behind the barrel. Her cheeks are red from the cold, the twisted fashion of her hair sprinkled with snow, and a small, weeping snowball bouncing between her hands. She looks undignified and not a little lovely.

This is undignified and not one bit proper.

He stoops, eyes glued on hers, and scoops up a handful of this snow. Before he's straight again, there's  a spatter of snow in the dead center of his chest, splattering into his face. He sputters. Sansa is dimly aware that while he looks very comical as he blinks down at it, she thinks him very handsome.

Suddenly, there is a ball of slush heading straight for her face. Sansa falls to her knees behind the barrel, so that his snowball flies overhead and bursts upon the stone wall behind her. Then she's up and running, leaving a trail of footprints in the snow for him to follow. Aegon tries to give chase. It doesn't work, because he's no idea how to run in this white stuff, let alone over the ice; he never knew snow in Lys, or Dorne, and spent little time off his horse or a dragon during the war in the past winter. He ends up tripping and the snow melts underneath his chest, soaking through his clothes in seconds. He gets up mud-stained, looking nothing like a king, or Aegon the Conqueror come again. 

He can hear Sansa let out a burst of laughter that is close to all but cackling, before she breathes and composes herself, and he gets up and brushes himself off. A figure twists up some steps nearby, sprinting toward the guard barracks. His eyes widen. “Dishonorable!” he calls. “That’s  _ not fair _ !”

There is little bustle in Winterfell, whereas in King's Landing it is hard to get heard over the din, so it’s very hard  _ not _ to hear the Queen of the North announce to every man on duty that the one who hits the dragon king with the most snowballs gets short hours for the rest of the week and two dragons up front.

While he is not sure if any would dare to throw anything at the King of the North, Aegon does not stick around to find out and flees the scene as quickly as possible. Perhaps the barracks were empty. Even so, a very smug Sansa Stark kisses his cheek the next morning in farewell as he departs for King's Landing. 

“Too cold?” she asks him.

“Too far,” he answers. “The Iron Throne waits.”

“Of course.”

“Sansa..”

“Aegon.”

They both smile,  _ hushed _ .


End file.
